Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Rethinking the History, Science, and Meaning of Auditory Hallucination - Hardcover

Smith, Daniel B.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1594201102 ISBN 13: 9781594201103

Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The, 2007

Synopsis

A history of auditory hallucination traces the medical community's understanding and treatment of the phenomenon throughout the ages while drawing on literary, psychological, and anthropological perspectives in order to shed light on how patients have managed and even found inspiration from related disorders.

About this title

About the Author:

Daniel B. Smith is a New York-based journalist and author. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Granta, and n+1

From Booklist:

Smith's father and grandfather both heard voices, and thereby hangs the tale Smith tells at the outset, and also his interest in the phenomenon of hearing people speak when no one else can and without otherwise sensing them. Research indicates that hearing voices isn't all that rare; that many cope well with it, belying its association with madness; and that so many parts of the brain are involved in audition that finding those responsible for hearing voices may be impossible. Smith proceeds from present-day science to the nineteenth-century labeling of hearing voices as hallucinatory, and then to famous cases of it, most of them preceding but one during its pathologization. Socrates (Smith posits that the voices the philosopher heard affected his sentencing to death), Joan of Arc, and a German jurist who largely recovered from schizophrenic voice hearing are the three figures about whom Smith writes so intelligently and absorbingly that one wishes he had covered others he notes, especially William Blake, as fully. One also wants to read more of him, on any subject he chooses. Ray Olson
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About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1594201102
• ISBN 13: 9781594201103
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272